The ways in volleyball and basketball that hand touches — high fives, low fives, fist bumps, etc. — maintain an energetic and affective flow throughout an athletic context, during play as well as during stoppages: congratulating, rewarding, acknowledging, affirming, but also dissipating sad passions, situational failures, and the like.

The difference between the two is largely structural: volleyball centralizes and ritualizes the hand touches, with all 6 players on the floor coming together after each point for a group exchange that appears quite indifferent to whether a point was scored or surrendered. In basketball, meanwhile, the hand touches are more distributed through the 5-player system as multiple haptic relays and switches, one player high-fiving another one here, another over there, and yet again; the energy staying on the move, diffuse, leaking into defensive transition opportunities and brief game stoppages as an occurrent "computational art" based on physical proximity, tempo, context, and event.

With the kinaesthetic abstractions in introductory gymnastics mentioned earlier, one might consider these serving as physical-cognitive 'prosthetics' for better understanding one's gestural relation to the unforgiving, constant quality of gravity and its right-angled vertical. The massive rock that is our planet overdetermines our every movement possibility (not to mention our gravitational or resonant qualities in potential between other bodies and objects in the terrestrial sphere); for the young child who is in the middle of a becoming-gravitational — in the sense of a living continuum from lying down to crawling to walking to more complex motor skills — these prosthetics are key supports for navigating this overdeterming force-relation. In a machinic-geometrical sense, these often take the form of inclined planes sutured in connexion to other elements of the abstracted apparatus.

"With the orthogonal plane, the flat plane, as in the entire history of architecture, there is no difference between making one movement or another. On an inclined plane, climbing and descending are radically different; but climbing diagonally or descending diagonally are different again; and walking laterally is different as well. Every dimension, every direction of space becomes a modification of the body." (Virilio, Crepuscular Dawn, p.36).

"The advantage of the oblique is that you can choose what you want, whereas with the orthogonal, or with Le Corbusier, the right angle is always straight and up. Architecture Principe was based on breaking the orthogonal in every way. It no longer accepted the tyranny of the right angle. Entering into topology — you can say into 'the fold,' even if Gilles Deleuze had not yet written his essay on the baroque at the time — we did a lot of work on it. We had a lot of choices to play with, but they were dependent upon the experiment" (p.40).

While the oblique function is also a form of abstraction, as with the gymnastic prosthetics mentioned above, the qualities of the two abstractions are different in notable ways. For example, in gymnastics the inclined plane serves to reduce or mitigate accidence, while in the case of the oblique function it serves to introduce accidental potentials. While Parent and Virilio appear to imagine an (ableist?) oblique function in which everyone is predominantly walking, gymnastics at this elementary stage of skill acquisition often deals with a wider spectrum of gestures, including crawling, somersaulting, and dismounting. That these gymnastic prosthetics are cushioned and floppy to various degrees — ie. fuzzy — further speaks to this gestural kinaesthetic relation of a somewhat precarious quality, that of the young toddler still coming to understand gravity and the body.

Perhaps the most important difference between the two concerns the line taken within the inclined plane: in the gymnastics example above the line taken by the athlete is a vertical one in co-composition with the y/z-axes of gravitational force — which is to say, a decelerative line. The oblique function as understood by Parent and Virilio, by contrast, is intended to co-compose with, across, and diagonal to the gravitational force line — which is to say, transversally accelerative.

But even this transversal approach by Virilio and Parent is limited, a special case of Euclidean space wrought upon the erect body — derivative. To reconsider this in more radical terms, while the inclined plane of the oblique function attempts to offer a destabilization of the gravitational orientation for the land-based interstellar world, a trampoline reintegrates this function, offering a more aquatic destabilization of the gravitational vertical in comparable fashion. An architecture (or architectonics) completely dedicated to these elastic surfaces thus opens the calculus of the fold (particularly when walking) into vestibular dynamism and the oceanic — which is to say, into jerkism.

In certain modern team sports there are a number of what we may describe as normative, yet legal, "desperation moves" that the team losing a contest may attempt as time begins to run out — provided the deficit is reasonably surmountable. In hockey, for example, the losing team will pull the goaltender in favour of an extra attacking skater; in basketball, a team will foul deliberately in order to force the other team to immediately shoot free throws; in gridiron football, there is the onside kickoff, etc.

Strategically, we might abstract these three examples as follows: in hockey, given the particular status (and equipment) that characterizes the goaltender, the attempt is to create an asymmetry in the number of attacking skaters and put pressure in the opposing zone. In basketball, constrained as it is by a required player symmetry, the attempt is to dilate the temporal parameters of the game, "extending" it by rapidly fouling and hopefully trading off multiple 1-point shots for 2- or 3-point shots at the other end. Gridiron football is also constrained by symmetry, on the one hand, but does not have regular and rapid turnover of possession either, and thus its attempt with the onside kick is to overload a space — or more precisely, to swarm a proximity.

In each case we witness a malleable, plastic quality — stretching, contracting, spasming — that over enough contests will have a statistically significant ability to turn the tide of victory in the timespaces of zero-sum athletic enclosure.

Sport (and its various mediations) perhaps best expresses that "interdimensional" experience of Being-in-the-City within its logic, offering at once in the same "subjectivity" both flâneur (player) and surveillance functions (diagrammatic x's and o's, archival game video).

Movement is the internalization of rhythm as it intersects with machines.

Jordan Crandall

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

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sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.